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Vicki Garlock was making her way through her morning read of Religion News Service when she came across a story about a man who earned a Guinness World Records title by visiting 76 places of worship in one month.
She thought, “I can beat that.”
That’s all it took for her to start planning. “I’m a very goal-oriented person,” she said. “Also, a little crazy.”
Garlock was raised Lutheran an hour south of downtown Chicago. She earned a doctorate in psychology and was a professor at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., until her children were born. Her career took a seemingly impossible left turn when she began to work for the Methodist church her family attended. She ended up writing a multiage, multifaith curriculum and books on world religions for kids, then teaching social studies teachers how to talk about religion.
In June 2023, when she read about the man who’d set the world record, it seemed possible to beat it. “I was just doing the math,” she said. “Of course, I really didn’t know what I was talking about.”
The preparation
Guinness takes world records seriously. Negotiating the parameters of her attempt took seven months. “I learned someone would have to sign a verification form for me at each place [of worship] and time,” she said. “And I could not use a personal vehicle.” It meant her attempt would need to be in a densely populated area with religious diversity and public transportation.
Chicago. Right near where she’d grown up a Lutheran.
Garlock spent most of 2025 planning stops, reaching out to worship houses personally—including ELCA congregations—and marking those stops on a 6-foot map of Chicago she’d hung on a wall. To safely clear the record, she scheduled 85 and 90 places, far beyond the 77 necessary. She briefly thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I got over 100?” But it seemed like a stretch.
“Lutherans really stepped up with answering the door and showing me around.” Garlock visited 12 or 13, including three called Emmanuel. Holy Family Lutheran in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood was the first Black ELCA church she’d ever attended.
Then, in August, she and her husband drove from their home in North Carolina to Chicago, where she’d rented a place for September. To ensure her efforts would be counted, she hired an official Guinness adjudicator. Then, she started. “That first day, I went to a Jewish synagogue, an Islamic center and some big churches,” she said. “Everyone was super nice.”
In fact, the whole first week was great. The weather was beautiful as she moved through the vast religious diversity in the vibrant big city of her home state. She thought, “Is this really what it’s going to be like? It doesn’t seem that hard!”
It gets much harder
That Friday, she received an email from Guinness. Someone else had broken the record by visiting 111 places of worship in one month. Now Garlock needed to visit 112—34 more than she’d thought she’d need, a 44% increase in the goal.
Her reaction? Freak-out. “I drank a bunch of wine and ate a very large pizza,” she said.
But the Guinness adjudicator said, “I think you can do it.”
The next day, Garlock went to her scheduled appointment at one house of worship and then thought, “Well, who’s worshiping on Saturday?” She found the nearest Seventh-day Adventist congregation in a rented space that was also an art gallery. She took a deep breath, walked in and told them about her faith-based, record-breaking (hopefully) odyssey. The man who signed her form was so excited, he directed her to two more Seventh-day Adventist churches nearby.
“I realized then that if I showed up where people were, they would be friendly, enthusiastic,” she said. “That changed everything.”
A new, and better, game
Garlock went to every scheduled appointment, then dropped in on others she found on the way. She spent six to 10 hours a day moving through Chicago by train, bus and foot, walking between 5 and 6 miles. Faith leaders, administrative assistants, cleaning staff and building managers signed her verification forms. Some visits lasted an hour and included nook and cranny tours of a much-loved space; others lasted just a few minutes. Her biggest day was 14 houses of worship visited, across suburban Evanston and Wilmette, including the Bahá’í temple at the last stop on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Purple Line.
These are the ELCA congregations she visited:
Augustana Lutheran Campus Ministry at the University of Chicago
Augustana Lutheran Church in Hyde Park
Holy Family Lutheran Church, Chicago
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Chicago
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston
Lutheran Campus Ministry at Northwestern University, Evanston
Resurrection Lutheran Church, Chicago
St. John Lutheran Church, Wilmette
St. Paul Lutheran Church, Evanston
Unity Lutheran Church, Chicago
Wicker Park Lutheran Church, Chicago
There were rough moments. The three hours in pouring rain searching for a Buddhist temple that wasn’t there. The Catholic church where she called someone the wrong name and lost two verification signatures, almost three hours and $8 in transportation costs. The constant search for a public bathroom. Most places of worship in Chicagoland have security; she was constantly aware that as a white, middle-aged woman, those on the other end of the door felt safe to open it. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was supposed to be in Chicago that Labor Day weekend (they didn’t show up in force until October).
At the many Hispanic Catholic churches she visited, “I was seeing a lot of people do their best to just live their lives,” she said. “And I got to have these amazing interactions. It was an interesting counternarrative.”
Garlock’s pilgrimage included Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim spaces, plus dozens of denominations and faith movements. Chicago’s Devon Avenue, for instance, “has Hindu and Sikh temples, [multiple] Jewish synagogues, several masjids and some churches. It’s a nice representation of what religious freedom can look like in America.”
At the end of September, after she’d completed all verification, she was pretty sure she’d done it but didn’t believe until the adjudicator told her she’d beaten the record.
More than beaten it. She visited 185 houses of worship in 30 days, 73 more than she needed to earn the record and over two times her original goal.
“My job is to teach people about world religions.” she said. “Chicago is in the middle of the Midwest. And look at how much religious diversity there is!” Mission accomplished.
As with all odysseys, the real meaning was in the journey itself. “We still struggle with [the concept of] religious freedom in America, with separation of church and state,” she said. “For me, being on the ground and walking around, what I saw was a lot of people enjoying religious freedom.”
And she really saw it all, or at least a heck of a lot of it: “There’s so much discussion about how polarized our society is. What I keep coming back to—what presented itself to me 185 times—is that we’re not as far apart as we think we are, ever.”
Gravlock chronicled much of her record-breaking journey on the Instagram account @worldreligions4kids.
